Against The Hype

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: An interview with Stephanie Zacharek, Salon‘s senior film critic.

Scanners: Wonderful insight on why monster flicks are no longer scary:

Now we no longer populate these movies with humans but with fodder. We’ve learned how to show the Monster but forgotten how to show people, and they become increasingly flimsy, predictable and mawkish — to stare at them too long is to get bored while waiting for them to be eaten. Instead we fetishize the Monster, and in staring at it too long, it loses its power too — everything has its depth stripped away, nothing means anything, and we’ve diffused or at least ignored our fears by shining a flashlight on every menacing shadow in the room. These movies have lost the capacity to connect to any real fear, and instead only appeal to our infantile desire to break our toys against each other.

GreenCine Daily: The intriguing history of the birth of the Production Code

For such a glorious time, Departures succeeds in being, at turns, a screwball comedy about a cellist thrust into the embalming business after his orchestra goes bust (Masahiro Motoki, who plies his movie with a hilarious physicality), and a faux-documentary about the intricacies, nobilities and pathos of the embalming ceremony and its bereaved spectators—that it lets us down whenever the more obvious narrative or “artistic” cues rear their head, as when various characters seem primed to have their opinions changed about the respectability of our hero’s profession, when the movie throws in random shots of him plying his cello atop the rolling hills, or when a few elderly characters seem just a little too important for their own good…

Departures | 2008 | Japan | Director: Yôjirô Takita| Screenplay: Kundo Koyama| Cast: Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ryoko Hirosue, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Kimiko Yo, Takashi Sasano

There’s a growing consensus that Zack Snyder’s movie adaptation of Watchmen is faithful to a fault, but it’s closer to say that the movie is faulty to the faithful. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ magisterial graphic novel poses a catch-22 to any would-be adapters: the nearer one hews to the source material, the farther one gets from matching its radical, far-reaching influences. We live in a post-Watchmen world, where cinema and the superhero genre have adopted so many of Moore’s originalities as their own that an adaptation that merely animates the novel’s plot and visuals at 24 frames per second will contribute nothing, save for an end to that pent-up potential with which the idea of a Watchmen movie has been ever anticipated. To that end, Snyder’s Watchmen is the definitive Hollywood adaptation, hell-bent on destroying all that Moore’s novel had stood for, while amping up its own lurid pleasures—and (fan)boy, does it succeed.

Let us dispense first with the myth of Snyder’s “faithfulness”. His slavish reproduction of the novel’s images is nearly as flattering to Moore and Gibbons as the Tijuana bible of herself that a retired Wonder Woman-type keeps as a memento in Watchmen: it might be nice to be paid tribute to, but not when the alleged tribute simply reduces you to a fanboy’s wank material. Audiences who think that this is somehow a “straight” or “literal” adaptation of the novel aren’t paying enough attention. In the novel, while waiting in a food line, the sociopath Rorschach defends himself by scalding his attacker’s face with a nearby pan of hot frying fat. In this movie, Rorschach has already taken down the attacker with his bare fists before he proceeds to smash a now-existent glass between him and the pan, hurling its contents into the felled man’s face. This is more work for Rorschach than before, not less, so the change is not some attempt to pare the novel down to movie length. It is a celebration of excess:

Violence. A brief physical combat in the novel, meant to counterpoint the emotional torture of another character, is made into its own extended point. Another fight is added for its own sake. Both are accompanied by blazing guitars.

Gore. An exceptional scene, not from the book, has Rorschach cornering an archrival in a bathroom. We’re left outside looking in, and the swinging door slices up our viewing rhythm; we catch only glimpses of Rorschach as he edges closer, closer to his prey. Cut away, the sound of a toilet flushing, and Rorschach steps into frame and out of the scene. Remarkable restraint on Snyder’s part, but the word I chose was “exceptional”, and not even then: the scene doesn’t end there, and the camera pans back to the bathroom door, so we can watch blood spill out from under it. (Duh.) As for the rest of the movie: head-cleaving, hand-severing, elbow-snapping—Snyder’s here to give, give, give.

Sex. Snyder scores “Hallelujah” to a prolonged sex scene between two Watchmen in an airship, which ejaculates fire across the night sky. It’s an emotional climax in the novel, but Snyder plays it for laughs even in the midst of making it more explicit, perhaps because that’s the only way he can defuse his own discomfort at such frankness.

Nudity. Granted, Dr Manhattan’s nudity is famous in comics, but the whole point was that he’s become so unbound by human norms that he’s nonchalant about it. Yet in the movie, Dr Manhattan’s penis is jarring, especially since Snyder doesn’t know how to handle it in any way other than as a visual punchline. He doesn’t reveal it often enough for us to get desensitized to it, so that whenever he cuts to a longer shot than usual—bam!—the eye gets distracted.

It doesn’t help that the penis in question seems bigger than it should be from the novels, which leads us to the question—given that Dr Manhattan is a god-figure in the movie—whether Snyder was being subconsciously meta.

Explosions. ‘Nuff said.

Pop music. Snyder shoehorns in the swelling trumpets of Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” over Dr Manhattan as he looms in over the sunset, disintegrating Vietcong troops in the foreground with a jab of his hand; and the strains of Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along The Watchtower” as two Watchmen navigate their airship into Antarctica, never mind the redundancy of scoring the lyrics “two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl” over a scene that shows us precisely that. The point of all this overscoring is to provide “oooh!” moments for fans who recall that Moore alluded to these songs in the book—a sort of pleasure that comes from being in on the joke.

Structurally, this is similar to the approach taken in the Harry Potter movies, another pop culture franchise with a hard-to-compress mythology. The result, too, is similar: Watchmen often feels snippy and episodic (made worse because the half-duplicated serial chapter structure focuses on each major character in turn) in its bid to retain the high points, the killer lines and classic images. When Snyder slow-mos a frame that’s the visual equivalent of yet another comic panel, then, he isn’t doing it out of some misbegotten sense of fidelity to Moore’s “vision”.

He’s doing it because it’s a money shot.

Want to rent the fantastic Watchmen or even watch it online? Visit LOVEFiLM, the home of movies on demand. Watchmen has been rated as one of the top superhero movies of the last decade. See what the all the hype is about for yourself. Visit LOVEFiLM today.

Watchmen | 2009 | USA | Director: Zack Snyder | Screenplay: David Hayter, Alex Tse | Cast: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino

It turns out, after two thousand words, that I am still not done gushing over Kung Fu Panda, especially the character that first stoked my adoration of this movie. Mr Ping, the goose father of the titular panda Po, convinced me just five minutes into his movie that it would be far deeper and wiser than it looked. Take this following line of Mr Ping’s, uttered in response to Po’s query about why he never pursued a childhood dream of running away from his father’s noodle shop to set up his own tofu business:

Oh, because it was a stupid dream. Can you imagine me making tofu?

(Laughs) Tofu…

No. We all have our place in this world: mine is here…

Voice actor James Hong snippily rushes the first sentence, raises his already-high pitch to a strain on the next, forces his airy chuckles, lowers his voice to a nostalgic simmer on “Tofu…”, and then summarily exclaims “No,” thereafter reverting to Mr Ping’s regular speech patterns. It’s a canny piece of voicework. With this single line, the writers and actor sketch the submerged anguish that plagued the aging Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) in Requiem for a Dream, recalling the rationalized happiness of the first part of her classic monologue, in which she anticipates her appearance on a TV show:

I’m somebody now, Harry. Everybody likes me. Soon, millions of people will see me and they’ll all like me. I’ll tell them about you, and your father, how good he was to us. Remember? It’s a reason to get up in the morning. It’s a reason to lose weight, to fit in the red dress. It’s a reason to smile. It makes tomorrow all right.

What have I got, Harry, hm? Why should I even make the bed, or wash the dishes? I do them, but why should I? I’m alone. Your father’s gone, you’re gone. I got no one to care for. What have I got, Harry? I’m lonely. I’m old.

The second part of this monologue captures how subtly cruel parents can be in guilt-tripping their children for pursuing their own lives, and the same idea is structured into Mr Ping’s next scene with Po. When Po headily tries to leave the restaurant to watch a historic kungfu tournament, Mr Ping stops him with a painfully innocent earnestness, interjecting Po’s attempts to explain where he’s going with wide-eyed, eager “Uh-huhs” that inadvertently bolster Po’s guilt at not wanting the future his father has planned for him. I’m reminded of Celine’s rant in Before Sunrise:

But you know what, if your parents never really fully contradict you about anything, and like are basically nice and supportive… It makes it even harder to officially complain. Y’know, even when they’re wrong, it’s this passive-aggressive shit, you know what I mean, it’s… I hate it, I really hate it.

Hong accomplishes his entire mission while skirting Burstyn’s pathos—perhaps because his character’s regret stems more from an unexplored avenue of passion, rather than a true purposelessness; and also because the genius of Kung Fu Panda is that it never lingers on these moments, so that they can be treasured by viewers old enough to understand the emotional truth behind them, while the younger members of the audience can breeze past them onto the movie’s next kinetic pleasure.

Kudos to Hong, too, for being one of the few voice actors in the movie—including Randall Duk Kim as the hoarse, crawling voice of Wugui the turtle; and Ian McShane with his haughty growl as Tai Lung the tiger—to appropriate the sound of his character’s animal, accenting his lines with a gooselike squawk. For a character actor like Hong, who has played bit Asian parts in classics including the manservant Kahn in Chinatown or the fur-wrapped engineer in Blade Runner, it might seem strange that his career-best work should arrive in an animated cartoon, in the shape of a Chinese goose. But, given the fullness he’s imbued this role, that’s nothing to be ashamed about.

The fifteenth day of the Chinese New Year marks the first full moon of the new lunar year, symbolic of the beginning of the rest of the year, and it is a time for families to reunite and appreciate what we have. How better to kick off a movie blog than on this day, with a review of a movie from the past year that not only celebrates Chinese culture, but should have been far more appreciated by movie lovers than it was?

Last week, Kung Fu Panda received an undeserved drubbing for sweeping the 36th Annie Awards, largely because it was competing with WALL·E, which has become the pre-ordained “must love” animated flick of 2008 since it was released in the summer to critical adulation. I’m not convinced. Sure, WALL·E showed courage in dishing out Hello, Dolly! songs, a post-apocalyptic landscape, a rusty leading robot, a pet cockroach, and minimal dialogue in its first twenty minutes. But Kung Fu Panda opens just as superbly, with a gorgeously hand-drawn animated sequence and some smart counterpoint narration which are less self-consciously “courageous”. It also sustains its unflagging pace and energy, and never sacrifices its emotional and character complexity for the sake of ambitious plot turns and situations—a misstep that I feel WALL·E commits, especially as the narrative swerves aboard the AXIOM spaceship.

But that is fodder for a future post, and here I shall instead concentrate on all that is joyful (and at times disappointing) about Kung Fu Panda. If you’ve watched it, how did you feel about it? If you agree with me, or think I’m full of it, please do tell me in the comments.

Review: Kung Fu Panda

Kung Fu Panda is the kind of working title we’d expect from studio executives hoping to stretch a one-note high concept into a full-length feature. It doesn’t help that the movie bears the usual marks of a stodgy DreamWorks animation: 1) a roundup of celebrity “voice actors” who have been corralled more for their marquee names than for their vocal expressiveness; 2) a trailer with its dreadful abundance of obese humour, in turn suggesting all the jokes about bodily expulsions hiding around the corner; and 3) a half-cutesy, half-grotesque protagonist who is modelled after the celebrity persona of his voice actor, whose “comic” contributions surely involve the sort of hijinks associated with that celeb. Add a trashy sensibility of chop-socky and slapstick, a predictably archetypal tale, and the lowbrow pedigree of its animation studio, and what critics’ glass ceilings can Kung Fu Panda be reasonably expected to conquer?

Folks, here is a movie brimming with confidence from the get-go. With its bravura hand-drawn opening sequence (in a CGI movie, to boot!), we are quickly tuned into the movie’s kinetic thrills, its splendid colour palette, its keen eye for theatrics, and—best of all—its penchant for mocking the overblown pomp of those theatrics, without denying us their pleasures. Instead it strips away the guilt around these pleasures, inviting us to indulge. “Legend tells of a legendary warrior… whose kungfu skills were the stuff of legend,” enunciates Jack Black, even as his silhouetted hero strides in through the mist without a trace of visual irony, and we delight in this movie’s notion that we can both celebrate and poke fun at our grandest cinematic traditions in one fell chuckle.

Black gives voice to Po, a panda who has spent his childhood imbibing the myths of kungfu and admiring his action figures of the Furious Five, a band of five warriors who live in the mountains overlooking his village. This makes him our surrogate, we who flock to the movie theatres for heroes greater than we can ever be, and yet to whom we may still aspire. At its simplest, then, Kung Fu Panda offers a crowd-pleasing tale of wish fulfilment, as Po painstakingly climbs his way to the top (and again, and again) without any sense of self-entitlement. The movie often works Po’s humiliation for laughs, layering on the pratfalls a bit too thickly at times—although we may doubt if a particularly cruel moment truly intends to elicit our laughter, such as in a winceful scene where Po tries to salvage his humiliation by trying at being dramatic, only to have it literally fizzle out on him. Or in an early scene, which should be read differently by children and their elders, where Po tries repeatedly to flip himself out of bed, causing a ruckus, and his father calls from downstairs: “Po, what are you doing up there?… all that noise.” These scenes are often discomfiting, never mean-spirited, and we see Po persist through so many hard knocks that by the end we find it hard to begrudge him his expected triumphs.

This structuring tale of Po’s overcoming his odds can be a problem if we fail to identify with him, and his character design does admit that possibility. Po’s corpulence is used early in the movie as shorthand for why he is clumsy and easily short of breath; and his occasional indignance at biases against him, coupled with Black’s nasal voice, can be whiny and off-putting. But is this a problem of the movie’s prejudices, or our own? The movie knows how such flaws etch away at their bearer’s self-esteem, even while it acknowledges that our sympathies may never fully sync with a character who is caricatured at these outsized proportions. As a result, it goes further than most movies of its ilk to temper our reactions to Po, often dwarfing him in long shots that also capture his bumbling physicality, and transmuting comic beats into rueful ones by sustaining those shots on Po for a few seconds longer than a comedy alone might need. All this self-doubt culminates in a beautifully direct confrontation between Po and his eventual master, each tearing away at the other’s rationalisations of his self-worth, yet hoping that the other will dispel his fears, until they’re both finally stripped down to their unsettling gut beliefs, no answers in sight.

Even if the movie weren’t honed so astutely towards Po’s plight as an obese character, it offers another avenue of identification with him: in his fanatic passion for kungfu. We don’t need to have watched an action flick to know the adrenaline-laden thrills of a fight, and we all know that the heightened, expertly-placed movements are more a result of choreography than finely-honed instincts, and yet we still feel the pang in knowing that we fall short of such impossible perfection. Po’s marvelling at his encounters is thus not an alien reaction to us, and the movie forces us to be Po’s distanced companion by withholding what he (and we) desperately wants to but cannot see at an early kungfu showcase. By the time he’s spirited away to the Furious Five’s temple and left there alone, we’re complicit in his exploration of this inner sanctum, and learn from the drops of his jaw the value of the treasures we encounter within—the movie’s sneaky way of making up its own self-contained myths.

As we home in on the Furious Five, we gain the pleasure of learning how much they‘re wading neck-deep in their own mythmaking as well. Despite their grandstanding at the public ceremony where the legendary Dragon Warrior is to be chosen, once the Five have retreated to their temple they all swap jokes about the eventual pick that seem almost too puerile for such experienced fighters. Likewise, when an outsider later stumbles into one of the Five’s rooms, catching him off-guard, the warrior appears far too naked, too fatigued, too awkward, too disappointed for his supposed stature. It can be easy to understate the wisdom of Kung Fu Panda‘s choice to depict the Five as adolescents, all dramatizing to fit the myths that they’ve convinced themselves to inhabit—to be the stoic disciplined warrior, or the immovable zen master, or even just an adult—such that we have to catch ourselves from expecting the self-same illusion of them. It is to the movie’s credit that we read into the Five’s reactions not just ennobled self-righteousness, but also petulance; and when they set off on their self-assigned mission, we can sense that they’re not entirely sure of themselves, but are willing to try for what seems right. The movie shows us the age-old ideals we’ve picked up from our heroic narratives, why we love them and our impossible distance from them, and lets its youthful characters feel the weight of that gap.

But if the movie’s youths are lost and flailing, its adults are ensconced in their wisdom, which is neither too conservative nor nonsensical for us to dismiss altogether. Po’s father is a pragmatic noodle-seller who believes that “we all have a place in this world,” and that he has inherited his. The writers give him an affecting monologue, only five minutes into the movie, about once having dreamt of running away to make tofu, and his voice actor James Hong deftly lets unease creep into the half-hearted chortles with which he dismisses his nostalgia for that dream. The writers and Hong also nail the near-callous way that he assumes the foolishness of Po’s own dreams while never seeming like an unsupportive parent—Hong bouncily inflects his natterings about noodles after Po underplays his true ambitions; and few visuals are as economical as the one in which Po embraces his father, separating to find that the latter has tied an apron around his waist. Likewise, Po’s master Shifu doesn’t know what to do with a youngster except to train their kungfu by being a mean old bastard to them, often justified in the pursuit of a Dragon Warrior status that they were never meant for. And one shouldn’t think too much about how the whole chain of events would never have begun but for the needless orchestration of Shifu’s master, Wugui, in his platitudinal attitude towards the nature of fate. Let us just say that for all Wugui’s insistence that “there is no good or bad”, he is partly responsible for the application of those labels to various characters in this tale.

It’s hard to believe that an attentive viewer, however initially jaded, can hence accuse Kung Fu Panda of having no teases and rewards. Early in the movie, Shifu reveals that to become the Dragon Warrior, Po must first access a scroll suspended high from the ceiling of a massive chamber. “So how does this work, d’you have a ladder, a trampoline…?” ventures Po. Shifu laughs and replies, “You think it’s that easy, that I’m just going to hand you the secret to limitless power? One must first master the highest level of kungfu,” and of course this is a dangled promise for an upcoming action setpiece, one of the five vivid ones that we have yet to encounter at this point, that surely involves the claiming of the scroll. But the muted anticlimax of this implied thread, and how the movie later uses the setpiece instead to challenge our sentiment for the treasures Po has fawned over in it, evinces the off-kilter design that the script uses to quietly deviate from its maligned formula. That the movie doesn’t operate on wild, ambitious plot turns is no crime, not when it calibrates so perfectly its hushed surprises.

Later, another surprise involves a dejected Po admitting to his father that sometimes he can’t believe he’s his son. “Oh…” replies his father. “Po, I think it’s time I told you something I should have told you a long time ago.” We’re primed by this exchange to expect a certain answer that’s been hinted at earlier, when the panda’s father—a goose—scrolls through a hilarious sequence of portraits of his father and grandfather—also geese. But instead, Po’s father switches his revelation for a seeming nonsequitur that so neatly ties up another plot thread before cutting away, we hardly realize that he wasn’t offering a nonsequitur at all, but an oblique and far more profound answer to Po’s doubts than we might have expected. Gamely, the script takes its apparent platitude about self-confidence and flips it into an insight about how we treasure the relationships dealt to us by fate, adding a new facet to the recurring brief exchanges of who is (or is not) whose master, and making a subsequent reunion between father and son all the sweeter—but only if we are willing to sit up and look past the surface cliché.

If we do, we’d realise how utterly generous it is for the writers to bestow the movie’s only major solo action setpiece upon the villain, slowing down his bounding up a steep rock face to telegraph his sleek grace; or another setpiece upon the Furious Five that cleverly incorporates them all even after they’ve been blindsided by their lack of importance to this narrative; and a final battle upon us that reshuffles all the pieces that came before, breathing new light into them. Nothing prepares you, either, for nifty details like the visual of a turtle unfurling from his shell to reveal that he was meditating upside down atop his wooden staff, or the hilarious sound of a collective wispy moaning when Po breaks a vase “said to contain the souls of the entire Tenshu army.” After Iron Man coasted its way to a matted robot-vs-robot anticlimax, The Dark Knight was overthrown by a winner-takes-all Joker, and WALL·E lost its way aboard the AXIOM spaceship—Kung Fu Panda has, against the odds, turned out to be the sturdiest, most perennially rewarding American blockbuster of the summer of 2008.

Kung Fu Panda | 2008 | USA | Directors: Mark Osborne, John Stevenson | Screenplay: Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger | Cast: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Randall Duk Kim, James Hong